She scared me then, she scares me now and she’ll scare me forever.
Sorry to hear of her passing though. I gotta say her interviews were always entertaining to watch.
R.I.P.
Oliver Stone was pressured by Warner Bros, afraid of lawsuits, to change Michael & Ruth Paine's names to "Janet and Bill Williams" for his 1991 film, '
JFK'.
Stone has since said he regrets going along with it, because the Paines were unlikely to sue -- and, if they did, a lot of things would have come out in discovery (which is
why they were unlikely to sue). Three years later, Stone was again pressured by the studio in his NIXON movie to make John Ehrlichman seem shocked and disapproving of things he'd
already been convicted of during the Watergate scandal, in order to avoid a lawsuit Ehrlichman had openly threatened to file.
I think I would have renamed the couple "Esther and Gabriel Hurte," but that's just my quirky sense of biblical humor. Stone probably preferred assigning them patently generic names instead.
But Ruth Paine is indeed a fascinatingly creepy figure. I just re-watched '
The Assassination and Mrs. Paine' a couple of times. She knows very well that people know she's lying, and she doesn't really care terribly much, mistress of her domain that she is. (Or was, until last September). Pro-lone nut supporters like Ruth, especially those close to the case who submit to interviews, do more harm than good to their cause -- and perhaps that's the idea, subconsciously or otherwise: she may
want people to know, but she cannot be the delivery system for that message. Except, perhaps, indirectly.
She has clearly embraced the fame over the decades which came along with her connection to the Oswalds. She's an actress. A mezzo-soprano diva in a tragic opera. Her final curtain-call coming only five months ago.
(And I know darned well what her Rising sign is).
